Britain's changed electoral map in and beyond 2015: the importance of geography

Three geographical elements play major roles in the operation of the UK's electoral system: the geography of support - how spatially segregated each party's voters are; the geographical clustering of those segregated areas; and the constituency boundaries within which those geographies are...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inThe Geographical journal Vol. 183; no. 1; pp. 58 - 70
Main Authors JOHNSTON, RON, PATTIE, CHARLES, MANLEY, DAVID
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published London John Wiley & Sons Ltd 01.03.2017
Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Subjects
2015
Apportionment
Boundaries
Britain
Clustering
Elections
electoral geography
general election
Geography
Great Britain
Political parties
Political systems
Voters
United Kingdom > UK
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary:Three geographical elements play major roles in the operation of the UK's electoral system: the geography of support - how spatially segregated each party's voters are; the geographical clustering of those segregated areas; and the constituency boundaries within which those geographies are nested. In the period from 1970 to 2010 as a result of the interaction of these three, Britain's apparent three-party system (four-party in Scotland and Wales) was represented in a series of geographically separate two-party systems. At the 2015 election, although there was little change in support for the two largest parties from the overall situation in 2010, there were substantial changes in the volume and geography of support for the five smaller parties. Those latter changes produced very different geographies in 2015 from those in 2010, with major likely consequences for the next contest in 2020.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-2
content type line 23
ISSN:0016-7398
1475-4959
DOI:10.1111/geoj.12171